I almost blacked out as what blood my body had managed to cling to exited my veins.It formed a multi-pronged rope like tentacles to work the rusty chain and the rustier padlock that bound me.
Perhaps no more than a mere second away from a fate worse than death—a state halfway between it and life I’d never escape on my own—the lock clicked open.The blood-tentacles freed me from my fetters, then raced back into my body, forcing awareness and the vestiges of life back into me.
I simply bobbed in place, my power clutching the reins, waiting to regain strength.When it gathered all that there would be, my blood emerged from my pores once more and coalesced into a serpunta that writhed and slithered as it swam, darting in this direction and that, knocking against the boundaries of my prison.
Whoever had put me here had locked me up inside a stone box that was too much like a sarcophagus to have been intended as anything but.
Whoeverhad intended never to see me again.
I’d compose an entireUnderestimate Me at Your Mortal Perilmelody while I hunted them down.It’d be a jaunty little tune, the kind that stuck in your head that you hummed without notice.I’d belt it at full volume, accompanied by a shimmy and all, before slicing off my captor’s head.
My sarcophagus was heavy, permanent stone, around twice the size of my body—the kind you moved only once, to its final destination.Filled with water as it was, it likely squatted on the seabed— one of the oceans, based on the salt that stung my eyes and burned my nostrils and throat.It wasn’t likeWhoeverwas likely to dispose of me at the bottom of someone’s swimming pool.
My blood transformed again, from a serpunta to multi-pronged tentacles.They pushed and heaved and banged against the walls of my tomb with as much force as the water and my strength would allow.
It wasn’t much.
Possibly, it wasn’t enough no matter my driving need to find Teo—him or his body, depending on Heartbreak’s disposition.Hope’s too.Life or Death’s, only if the others didn’t care.
Also twins, Life and Death were known to be wicked gamblers, the more bizarre the scenario, the better.Maybe they’d already bet on my shitty odds.
A whimper, the pathetic kind I’d never allow myself with witnesses, burbled up my stinging throat even as my blood-tentacles bashed at the stone some more.Bang, bam, boom, crash.The sounds were sharp only in my mind, the sea muting them like everything else.
My blood-tentacles fought to free me, harnessed what strength they could, then tried again.
And again.
And who knew how many timesagain.
I was numb all over when I finally heard acreakas of shifting stone.
In a frenzy, my blood-tentacles banged and struck.They heaved and pushed.
And after the lid eventually slid ajar so that I could swim outside—victory!—my blood returned to me, vibrating with excitement and concentrated power.
The last thing we wanted to do was wait any longer, but we waited.We made ourselves rest.
Minutes, hours, perhaps even days eked past before my blood finally stirred anew.It hadn’t grown from its puny trickle, but it would have to do.
I squeezed past the lid and immediately gripped it to keep myself from floating upward too soon.In my home nation of Zaraga, the poor were burned after death, often in communal pyres.But the rich, they were laid to rest in exquisite sarcophaguses like this one, the deceased’s likeness carved into the stone lids.Tremulous from grief, shock, cold, or a debilitating lack of blood—dealer’s choice—I traced shaking fingers along the contours of a woman.Long hair.Round face.Straight nose ever so slightly upturned at the tip.Ears pointed at their crests.Full lips, breasts, and hips.Slim waist.A gown concealing legs and arms.
Shaking all over now, I clung harder to the stone and slid fingers toward the left temple.Any sculptor might have omitted the potentially insignificant detail.Especially since Beauty was prideful and valued a perfection impossible to achieve for the living.Not for the dead, however.
The ocean was so still, my pulse thundered through my head.
My fingertips alighted on the spot I could pick out even in the pitch-dark at the bottom of an ocean.
There it was.There it fucking was.
A shallow, slim line traced from the hairline, down around the eye socket, along the edge of the cheekbone, ending beneath the earlobe at the seam of the jaw.
Scant fae sported scars since we were imbued with superior healing—under normal circumstances.Normal, nothing in my life had ever bothered to be.
No other fae in the entire Opalese World would have a scar exactly like this one.And as if that weren’t enough to convince me, on that same left side, matching dots marked the eyebrow and cheekbone.Marks like this were also rare among fae, whose appearances were as close to perfect as the living could ever be.
Not me, though.I’d been different from the start.Glaringly imperfect.
There was no one else this could be.
